I don’t remember when or why I picked up a small plastic bottle of anise seed at Mitad del Mundo on North Main Street. I was glad it was in a kitchen cabinet the other evening, when I decided to try my hand at making biscotti.

Jane Bimson, who works in The Star’s front office and who I like to talk with about all things cooking, chided me gently on Monday when I raved about how easy it was. “You’re 55, and you are just now finding out!” she said, as she made a note to bake some biscotti for herself very soon.

Jane is a master in the kitchen. Her sweet pickles brighten our Decembers every year, when she hands out a jar for each person at The Star. I am told Baylis Greene quietly consumes every last slice before the day is out. At birthdays, she always makes carrot cake muffins with cream cheese frosting, leaving them on the office kitchen table to honor the person whose lucky day it is. Because I can’t have dairy products, Jane places a single topping-free muffin on my desk before I get in.

We are an office filled with foodies. Russell Bennett’s wife, Fiona, is a test chef and often sends him in with the most remarkable of treats. Matt Charron’s eats are consistently healthy, and we often talk about that. Jennifer Landes knows all about the restaurants. Laura Donnelly (who does not come into the office often enough) and I could talk for hours about scallops and beach plums. My sister, Bess, who works downstairs on East magazine, is a whiz with desserts and has a massive stash of antique cookbooks.

Kathy Kovach, who used to work here, and Carissa Katz, the manag ing editor, worked in catering on the side for years. I spent several summers selling fish at Claws on Wheels in East Hampton, getting to know the regular customers and making up names for some of them, my favorite the “Pounda Flounda Guy.” Leigh Goodstein, a former reporter, manages the Clam Bar on Napeague. I could go on.

There is a thing, I think, about food and the news business, though I can’t quite put my finger on it. Years ago at a wedding, I met a woman who worked in human resources at The Times who told me they put internship résumés in two piles: those with food service experience and those without. They called in the food service people for interviews. I can see why.

A New Year’s resolution may be an indulgence in wish?ful thinking, but I’m determined to fulfill a modest resolution I’ve made for 2019. It’s simple: I am going to sort through my T-shirts and give away most of them. Exactly when I took to buying T-shirts in large numbers is clouded in history. Suffice it to say they come from only two or three retailers and can no longer fit in a bureau drawer, so they clog my closets.

Giving away clothes makes us feel good; we like to spin it as an earth-friendly effort at recycling. (Although, if you have ever seen a good documentary called “T-Shirt Travels” you know how not-so-wonderful the used-clothing trade actually is for local industries in the countries where our castoffs end up, though I guess it might still be better than the landfill.)

Many residents here donate their nicest unwanted clothes to the Bargain Box, the secondhand shop run by the Ladies Village Improvement Society of East Hampton, which — despite having become quite tony in recent years and not always as big a bargain — is still chockablock with fortuitous fashion finds. Young men of my acquaintance have found perfect tuxedos at the Bargain Box, and there always seems to be a plethora of secondhand designer shoes and outfits.

My daughter tells me she and a close childhood friend had an argument in the Bargain Box’s dress?ing rooms, over Christmas, about a beautiful Carolina Herrera poppy-colored skirt suit with cutout lace trim that was on sale for $10 and probably was originally priced at 200 times that; it didn’t fit either of them, but was too tempting to leave on the rack. (The Herrera suit, I’m told, is currently on a jet plane on its way to Seattle with the victorious childhood friend.)

I am afraid that the staff who manage the Bargain Box would laugh me right out of the building if I showed up with my T-shirts. They would likely suggest I take them to the row of donation bins at the dump, but I am not enthusiastic about that.

Everything that goes into those bins is bundled into bales and resold in less-affluent communities and countries, from the Canadian Maritimes to Zanzibar. No doubt you have seen men, women, and children in faraway places wearing clothes with all kinds of American logos? The reason people on the other side of the world are photographed in Bonac football jerseys and “I’m With Stupid!” T-shirts is because the clothing-bale industry has knocked local fabric and clothing manufacturers right out of business.

I will never forget a jammed, warehouse-like store called Frenchie’s in the small town in Nova Scotia where my daughter used to live; it was stocked entirely with items from these secondhand bales. It was amusing to realize while browsing that all of the clothing, recognizably, had originated from donation bins in the Boston area: In among the woman’s cashmere pullovers from J. Crew and the used lacrosse uniforms, we found a green T-shirt with the logo of Concord Academy, the boarding school in Massachusetts that my daughter attended.

As for the Bargain Box, it has been a year or more, but I remain sorry that the L.V.I.S. decided to stop offering children’s clothes there. Apparently, it just didn’t make economic sense to give over valuable selling-floor space to a kids’ clothing section that didn’t turn much of a profit. Also, I’m told, it was difficult to find reliable volunteers to take on the unglamorous, week-in-week-out task of sorting and pricing things for this particular department.

Still, the fact is that many families hereabouts depend on hand-me-downs to clothe their kids. This is true for both old-time locals and newer arrivals.

It seems to me that a thrift shop is, in this regard, a moral venture. Not only do thrift shops almost invariably benefit charitable causes, and not only do they enable recycling, but they lend a needed hand to those who cannot afford boutique shopping. “Waste not, want not” is indeed a noble dictum. Perhaps someone who reads this — someone with experience in the clothing trade, or a pair of friends — will be inspired to offer their volunteer services to our beloved Bargain Box.

David Brooks wrote the other day about his fear that America might soon become a kakistocracy, and, of course, I had to look the word up. Derived from ancient Greek, it means, our dog-eared Webster’s dictionary tells us, “government by the worst men.”

I had been thinking along the lines of caca, and cacastocracy, and hadn’t, as it turned out, been far off the mark, but for some reason, perhaps because I remain an optimist in the face of all the evidence to the contrary, I tend not to agree with the columnist’s dour outlook for the year 2019.

Trump, he seems to think, when it all comes down, will, like a wounded wild boar (my analogy), run roughshod over everyone, over the Constitution, the rule of law, common decency, all that.

Will there be sages the likes of Archibald Cox, Elliot Richardson, and Judge John Sirica (he could also have included in that number Sam Ervin, Howard Baker, and Peter Rodino) of Watergate fame to stand up to him, and, in so doing, reassert the equilibrium that our system of checks and balances intends?

Or will we be thrown — a likelihood in his view — to the wolves of party loyalty, ideological fervor, and general calumny?

And yet, and yet. . . . When the chips were down, a fellow East Hamptoner reminded me at a holiday party not long ago, Americans tended in critical moments to put their shoulders to the wheel and to do, in concert, the right thing.

We were talking about countering East Hampton Airport’s pollution (the airport itself being a Depression-era offspring of that can-do spirit), but his assertion can be applied to the amelioration of any number of ills, whether environmental or societal, that cry for attention.

I am an optimist and I believe him, not the dour David. People of good sense will stand up, sweet reason will win the day, that’s my New Year’s prediction.

The day before New Year’s, I found myself wondering if there were resolutions I should make. Perhaps I could come up with something simple, promise myself not to go to bed with dishes in the kitchen sink or lights on in the living room. My husband makes sure the pots and pans are scrubbed before he calls it a day, and as a morning person, I am up and at it early the next day to put them away.

With newfound energy, I look forward to the beginning of a nice day — and The New York Times. Even though I know The Times can be read online, I like finding it on the front lawn. With a cup of coffee in hand, I think of it as a comfortable routine. But as I write this, it is the last day of 2018, and The Times is anything but comforting.

The headlines on the front page read: “C.I.A.’s Afghan Forces Leave a Trail of Abuse and Anger,” “Trump Digs In, Dimming Hope of a Budget Deal,” “Stunning Fall of Nissan’s Brash Savior,” “How a PowerPoint Slide Tangled McKinsey in a U.S. Bribery Case,” and “Cultural Shifts Sweep Away a California Bastion of Conservation.” Nothing positive there.

On most mornings, looking for solace, I turn to nature — the birds and houseplants. The birds are satisfying to take care of, and easy. You keep a feeder full of seed and an eye out to identify what they are, although I have to admit I cannot tell one sparrow-like bird from another. A family member who had not lived on the East Coast before marrying and moving here not only knows them all but can distinguish between the males and females. 

All right, to be honest, I can say I know one cardinal from another. The red males brighten the yard and the subtle, tannish-yellow females are beautiful to see. As for the house plants, I enjoy the almost constant fussing they require. No matter how frequently I tend them, though, there is more to do — a dead leaf I missed on a first foray to be removed, for example, and a plant to be turned so the side that warrants more sun gets it.

I think concentrating on these things instead of the news, or the chores and responsibilities that lie ahead, allows for a good morning. The trouble is that each day brings more than mornings. Ideas and events that do not necessarily bode well have a way of intruding. But let’s forget the news. 

I am counting on the Chinese to set things right. The 4,716th Chinese year begins on Feb. 5, and 2019 is said to be the year of the brown or female earth pig. According to the Chinese, a female pig is a portent of good news. I am hoping she makes the new year one of the best.

Empty but for the two of us on the top deck of the Cross Sound Ferry bound for New London on New Year’s Day, my middle child and I watched the waves. Evvy, named after my late father, takes after him in many ways, though they never met. It was her idea to explore the boat, and he, like us, would have been outside on the deck while the rest of the passengers sat quietly inside, away from the wind. Pointing out Gardiner’s Island and the Ruins, I thought about him, the many things he told me about the weather and the bay, but I kept it to myself.

A half-mile off the starboard side of the John H., whitewater was rushing up and down the cobble beach on Plum Island. Evvy asked why the waves were so high. I fumbled an answer, something about the wind reaching across the Sound all the way from New Haven. What makes waves, she asked. The wind, I said.

The truth is that although I believe the wind makes waves, I do not know how it works. The basic elements are obvious enough. A breeze able to be felt on the skin on an otherwise still day ruffles the surface of the water. As the wind rises, so, too, do the ripples become chop. Given enough fetch, the chop becomes waves, the waves become swell. What drives it all is unseen.

As I recall dimly from books, notably Willard Bascom’s seminal “Waves and Beaches,” wind agitates molecules of water. The rapid aggregation of swell, which made the ferry roll sidewise on the first day of the year, is harder to grasp. Remarkable, I think, too, is that swell can travel hundreds or thousands of miles, even passing under a calm surface, like the ripples of a bed sheet being shaken.

Near the Connecticut shore, the motion of the John H. gradually settled. Each wave lifted it slightly less than the one before. Passengers who had been bolt upright leaving Orient Point put down their heads and their phones and dozed. Closer in, getting back into cellular range, phones came out and people began to stir as we pulled into the shelter of the lower Thames. There were ripples on the water as we docked, but not enough to worry the shore on the other side of New London Harbor.

We saw a horror movie the other night as an antidote as it were for the reality that surrounds us. Can it get any worse? Yes, yes it can, but don’t tell, don’t want to give anyone ideas.

I’ve been meaning to read “Coriolanus” again, knowing that it treats of a tyrant, though one, I think, bred of the left. Still, it ought to be instructive. 

It seems that our aspiring tyrant is forever incensed by anyone who has any sense. 

I would say yes, exit the Mideast, were it not for the fact that much of its anguish can be traced to us, and that therefore we’re obliged to try to undo as best we can the chaos that’s ensued. No, we alone can’t solve the world’s problems, but we can in partnership with allies work toward ameliorating them. 

Meanwhile, it’s obvious that we can win more hearts and minds to democracy through the examples of our free societies rather than through the bombing of wedding parties and tacitly abetting the starving of children and the butchering of journalists.

President Kennedy presented our case well, I think, in his inaugural address, but his speeches and papers are blacked out at the moment because of the government shutdown — inspirational, well-considered words being considered off limits, I suppose, at Christmastime. Now there’s democracy for you.

At any rate, it is clear that one branch of the government ought not to run roughshod over the other, the whole idea apparently being that with debate, rather than rigidity, a balanced tension was to be forever maintained when it came to issues of governing. Something, I suppose, like a Calder mobile. 

I think I’ll read Joseph J. Ellis’s “American Dialogue” soon too. It deals with some myths attributed to our founders, to wit, that they all were for small government and were “originalists” when it came to the Constitution. They were, in fact, of different (yet not closed) minds.

Adams, according to Ellis, proved prescient in saying that a strong national government would be needed to counterbalance the wealth and power that he thought would inevitably wind up in few hands, and that, to quote from Jeff Shesol’s Nov. 4 New York Times review, “the free market required regulation for capitalism to coexist with the egalitarian expectations of democracy.”

And Madison, and Jefferson also, believed apparently that the Constitution was indeed a living document that was to be viewed in context with the times, to wit, that there was not a “single source of constitutional truth back there at the founding.”

The founders intended, then, that we debate issues, and from that debate move toward effective solutions. We were to try through the give-and-take to make sense of things, to think, if you will, rather than, with arms tightly folded and incensed, cling to certainty. 

Now is the time of lights, so let’s lighten up then.

Robert DeLuca, the president of the Group for the East End, and State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. have declared war on the Southampton Town Zoning Board of Appeals, and, at least in my opinion, rightfully so.

The war is a legal proceeding known as an Article 78 in which they charge the Z.B.A. is violating a section of the town’s open space law governing “subordinate, customary, and accessory uses,” and the state’s Open Meetings Law, which is understood to require a quorum of all municipal agencies and committees to deliberate publicly. 

What makes this of more than routine interest is not whether the 118 housing units and 18-hole golf course proposed for the Pine Barrens, the vast open space that protects a critical aquifer, would harm the environment, but the law requiring public deliberations, which has been endorsed by the state committee on open government and confirmed by the courts. 

Instead of meeting to hash out opinion, the members of the Z.B.A. have decided to follow seemingly arrogant advice from the Southampton Town attorney, James Burke, who thinks it is okay for them to be polled by email. Adam Grossman, the chairman of the Z.B.A, has confirmed this procedure.

The issue was a luxury resort being developed in East Quogue by the Discovery Land Company of Arizona. An assistant Southampton Town attorney, Kathryn Garvin, has said the policy — “polling members individually by email rather than holding public discussions on applications and questions before the board” — is legal. However, from where I sit, it violates the state’s Open Meetings, or Sunshine, Law, which guarantees that official business be conducted in an open and public manner.

A number of organizations and environmentalists have joined the lawsuit, including Richard Amper, the executive director of the Long Island Pine Barrens Society, and Albert Algieri, president of the East Quogue Civic Association, along with a number of East Quogue residents.

I believe environmental concerns should be a priority in governmental decision-making, but what is threatened here is an overriding state law. Allowing the members of municipal bodies to decide if and when to follow the law is tantamount to chaos. Regardless of how big an environmental threat this development would be, the procedure by which the Southampton Town Z.B.A. has shut out the public is an even more serious public threat.

Winter’s sound is a scrape. There is ice to be removed from the truck’s windshield. The ground talks back as you walk. Tree limbs cross, swordsmen in a drawn-out dance. On the bay, frozen blocks will shift against each other as waves pass underneath and die. 

Gone like the leaves that only recently wore their cloaks, the true songbirds have moved south. Taking their place, here to pick at hard, red berries, are the jays, their sharp cries scratching the ear. 

Crows, like black darts on the pink sky, move at first light, cawing greetings or warnings, not exuberance. The small chickadees, seed eaters, ping from the brush, their voices less melody than percussion.

It is strange that nature would abandon its sweet songs of spring once winter comes. Perhaps it is utility, though; when survival depends on what rocklike forage the others leave behind there is little need for harmony. 

Yet, the Inuit people sing, perhaps because for millenniums they were able to make their own warmth with fire. There are songs to calm a baby, songs to entertain or teach a skill. Humans are social creatures; we depend on it to survive. Birds that perch in the dull brush are solitary in their late December searching. They must stay alive now to fly home to nest. 

Far in the north, there may be song in time. The jay could turn sweet-throated, the chickadee melodious. I don’t know. That is long months away. Until then, birds here call now and then from the thicket, if only to reassure themselves that there will be time for singing once again.

It’s a few days before Christmas and I should wrap up my thoughts for Mary, with whom I share daily bread and whose company I always look forward to, as does O’en.

We are the two of us smitten, and I always say to him on the way home that we’re drawing near to her. That perks him up. Me too. 

Pretty much all the accoutrements of the season have vanished, now that the kids are gone, though there was, until it fell off, a nice wreath on our door, and now a small tree, a real one in a bucket, sent by Sheila from Southern California, which reminded me that Christmas is celebrated to the nines in the desert.

There was a time, wasn’t there, when an orange or a persimmon or some sweetmeat for the children would do, but it’s all out of proportion now. Surfeit’s the order of the day. I really don’t envy the young all those things.

Perhaps prompted by such contrarian thoughts, we’ve begun divesting ourselves lately of things, thinking, as we sort through all the stuff, what it is we want to save. 

I want to save us, as we are at our ease, talking lightheartedly across the table, about any manner of things — things of the mind, mind, not of things you can stub your toes on.

“I did get you something,” she wrote me once, “but I didn’t have time to tell you my thoughts before they were wrapped. . . . We are the changing seasons. . . .”

Deep transience, I’m thinking.

When at our best, I mean, when not wrenched from the present — her presence being enough of a present for me, she who is beautiful, witty, and true. 

Could you wrap that thought up, please? Yes, with that shiny red paper and white ribbon. I’ll put it under the tree. 

It’s for someone whose days, I hope, will always be merry and bright, though I should add her Christmases needn’t be white.

Merry Christmas to you all. It’s not quite 60 years since I first began to celebrate Christmas with the Protestant family I married into. I was brought up in a secular Jewish family that didn’t do much more in December than light a special menorah for the eight nights of Hanukkah. (I remember my maternal grandfather giving me chocolate Hanukkah “gelt” each year, too, and I cherish the brass hanukiah with two lions of Judah I inherited.) 

Hanukkah took place this year during the first week of December, which feels like eons ago! The last two weeks have been a head-spinning round of community events: choral concerts, carol singing, craft sales, and all the pageants the children get involved in. 

Opportunities for wishing people a Happy Hanukkah come far less frequently than do chances to wish everyone a Happy Christmas — perhaps because there are far fewer public celebrations surrounding the Festival of Lights. 

One of the most uplifting things about this time of year, for me, is the merry round of annual holiday concerts in the schools, and the various theatrical productions put on by dance studios and student troupes. These shows truly are one of the nicest perquisites of being a grandparent.

Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” was performed twice at Guild Hall’s John Drew Theater two weeks ago by students of the Hayground School in Bridgehampton, which two of my grandchildren attend. A total humbug sitting near me in the audience at the second performance semi-humorously griped that the experience amounted to an hour and a half of trying without success to hear, let alone understand, what the youthful cast was saying. . . . Well, I say, try sitting in the front of the theater next time! The kids may not all enunciate as well as Laurence Olivier, but just the experience of memorizing snippets of Shakespeare’s language is educational, and coming onto the stage as part of a creative community is obviously a joyful ritual. 

Then, last week, came Studio 3 dance school’s three performances of “Mixed Nuts,” a mashup of “The Nutcracker” and a more contemporary musical (in this case, “The Wizard of Oz”) at the Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor. One of my granddaughters — following in the slipper-clad footsteps of an older cousin — simply loves the classes she takes at 

Studio 3, which is tucked away in a Bridgehampton commercial building off Butter Lane. The instructors — Diane Shumway, Meredith Shumway, Jenna Mazanowski, and others — have nurtured a stable of young dancers with talent that in some instances is truly startling. There were elements of ballet, jazz, and lyrical dance in this year’s “Mixed Nuts,” and the “bravos” and “bravas” at the end of Saturday night’s show were sincere.

Perhaps the most enlightening, and most surprising, entertainment this December — last week, as well — was the Ross Lower School’s enactment of plays the students had written themselves after studying the lives of three inspiring historic figures: Mary Anning, Louis Braille, and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Dr. King’s place in history is known to all. The story of Louis Braille is also celebrated, but likely new to the young thespians: As a young blind boy, Braille invented a series of raised dots that translated into letters and words, making it possible for him to read. I myself had never heard before of the third subject, the British paleontologist Mary Anning, a dedicated fossil hunter in the early-19th century who discovered crucial artifacts of the Jurassic period in the cliffs near Lyme Regis.

The biggest surprise was to see one of my grandsons perform as Dr. King. While some of my grandchildren are African-American, this particular grandson is not. Watching a blond 8-year-old embody Dr. King was both somewhat humorous and absolutely heartwarming.